On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 3:07 AM, Kevin Turner <kevin.turner@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Therefore, Foucault refused to impose "sexuality" onto Greeks and
>> Romans, not speaking of the "Greco-Roman experience of sexuality" or
>> things like that.
>
> True, but he does talk about the "Greco-Roman experience of
> aphrodisia" or "the Christian experience of the 'flesh,' and he
> talks about these as being the condition of possibility for
> 'the formation and development of the experience of sexuality
> from the eighteenth century onward.' The fact still remains that
> he is not referring to subjective experience, but nor is he talking
> about experience as a historical process (i.e. in Hegelian terms).
> Rather, experience is a means of rendering certain historical
> processes intelligible, and rendering them intelligibly by way of
> a history of the relations that have obtained between subjectivity and truth.
It would be interesting to do a quantitative analysis of the term
expérience in Foucault's works, identifying where and how often the
term appears and analyzing how it is used. Such an analysis may help
us better understand whether Foucault thought "being" was always
already constituted as "experience" or "being" had historically come
to be constituted as "experience." To my knowledge, though, Foucault
never did any archeology of "experience" as such nor did he elevate
the level of his critical elaboration of the term to that of, say,
truth, power, knowledge, etc.
>> "Sexuality," "madness," etc., or "economy," etc., may one day cease to
>> exist, and we may consider under what historical conditions they will
>> cease to be intelligible. But till then these historically
>> constituted domains of practice will rule our social relations in ways
>> that are not subject to conscious individual choice. As a matter of
>> fact, even as we speak now, "sexuality," for instance, is likely to be
>> becoming an intelligible experience for larger proportions of people
>> in the world than before.
>
> but that does not mean that sexuality exists - it is not a pre-given
> object (as Foucault says of madness: 'We can certainly say that
> madness "does not exist," but this does not mean that it is nothing',
> STP: 118), but is, as you say, an "historically
> constituted domains of practices."
Nothing is a pre-given object but that doesn't mean that what has come
to be historically constituted doesn't exist in ways that objectively
shape the lives of people nor is it "less real" than, say, DNA. It's
not a matter of false consciousness that a correct understanding on
the part of an individual can dispel. That I think is what we can
take from Foucault as well as others who help us historicize.
Yoshie
>> Therefore, Foucault refused to impose "sexuality" onto Greeks and
>> Romans, not speaking of the "Greco-Roman experience of sexuality" or
>> things like that.
>
> True, but he does talk about the "Greco-Roman experience of
> aphrodisia" or "the Christian experience of the 'flesh,' and he
> talks about these as being the condition of possibility for
> 'the formation and development of the experience of sexuality
> from the eighteenth century onward.' The fact still remains that
> he is not referring to subjective experience, but nor is he talking
> about experience as a historical process (i.e. in Hegelian terms).
> Rather, experience is a means of rendering certain historical
> processes intelligible, and rendering them intelligibly by way of
> a history of the relations that have obtained between subjectivity and truth.
It would be interesting to do a quantitative analysis of the term
expérience in Foucault's works, identifying where and how often the
term appears and analyzing how it is used. Such an analysis may help
us better understand whether Foucault thought "being" was always
already constituted as "experience" or "being" had historically come
to be constituted as "experience." To my knowledge, though, Foucault
never did any archeology of "experience" as such nor did he elevate
the level of his critical elaboration of the term to that of, say,
truth, power, knowledge, etc.
>> "Sexuality," "madness," etc., or "economy," etc., may one day cease to
>> exist, and we may consider under what historical conditions they will
>> cease to be intelligible. But till then these historically
>> constituted domains of practice will rule our social relations in ways
>> that are not subject to conscious individual choice. As a matter of
>> fact, even as we speak now, "sexuality," for instance, is likely to be
>> becoming an intelligible experience for larger proportions of people
>> in the world than before.
>
> but that does not mean that sexuality exists - it is not a pre-given
> object (as Foucault says of madness: 'We can certainly say that
> madness "does not exist," but this does not mean that it is nothing',
> STP: 118), but is, as you say, an "historically
> constituted domains of practices."
Nothing is a pre-given object but that doesn't mean that what has come
to be historically constituted doesn't exist in ways that objectively
shape the lives of people nor is it "less real" than, say, DNA. It's
not a matter of false consciousness that a correct understanding on
the part of an individual can dispel. That I think is what we can
take from Foucault as well as others who help us historicize.
Yoshie